One of the best gifts of Plan 9 was static linking: <a href="https://9p.io/wiki/plan9/why_static/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://9p.io/wiki/plan9/why_static/index.html</a><p>Hard drives are cheap, so space is not an argument anymore, for reasonable uses of disk space. And most uses are reasonable!<p>Ah, but you might say, if a shared library is compromised, it's easy to push a fix! But how to you think it got so widely compromised in the first place? Perhaps because it was a widely shared library? Sharing is a double-edged sword.<p>The impetus behind the virtual environments for scripting languages, like Python's venv and Ruby's RVM, is isolation from the base system. Untold developer hours have been lost in attempts to run software with different dependencies than the base system. It's a total mess.<p>We shouldn't expect an operating system to be a monolith that dictates the dependency versions for all the code that runs on it. Code should be deployed in sandboxes and it should be independent of the base system. When the code is removed, it should be like it was never there.